Roslyn.
Everyone was in position.
Selene brushed her fingers beneath Gus’s chin, steadying her own nerves as much as his. “You remember what you have to do?”
A wash of images spilled through her mind. The herd. Short bursts of fire—just enough to scare them.
Selene dipped her chin, mouth curving despite the storm in her chest. “Make trouble.”
“We have bigger trouble,” Kai said, voice low but unshakable. “The gas burns.”
Her Stormguard spun to face her.
Otekah followed Kai’s gaze to where a loose tongue of flametwisted unnaturally in the mist. Fire coiled from the torch, then winked out with a sharp, unnatural hiss.
Poloma’s eyes narrowed on the green-tinged haze. “It’s flammable. If the gas thickens—and it will—we could be looking at multiple explosions.”
Poisonedandburned alive.
Usti had thought of everything.
“We need to put out the torches,” Pamuy said, already turning to move. “Tiponi and I can?—”
“What if you’re not fast enough?” Otekah cut in.
“We can’t stand here and do nothing,” Niabi argued.
“We won’t.” Kai’s pulse kicked harder. “But, whatever we’re doing, we need to do it fast.”
A tendril of gas drifted toward a fallen torch. The flame caught?—
Not an explosion. A bright, sharp flare. It licked toward the mist and curled back on itself, like it had tasted something it wanted more of.
Not violent. But hungry. Controlled.
A memory surfaced, fierce and clear. A piece of advice her mother had given her long ago. “Sometimes you don’t fight the fire—you feed it. Just enough to turn it back where it came from.”
Shadi had meant emotions. Rage. Grief. But the memory roared forward now, uninvited, and made a different kind of sense.
Kai’s breath caught.
She knew exactly what to do.
“We don’t stop the fire,” she said. “We start it.”
The others stared at her, blinking.
“Not in here,” she clarified. “At the source. The vent.”
Poloma straightened. “A controlled burn.”
“Exactly.”
Kai scanned their faces—her Stormguard, every one of them the sharpest blade in her arsenal. “Arrows. Flame-tipped. We burn the poison before it spreads.”
“The fire will hit the heavier gas at some point,” Poloma said. “Itwillexplode.”
Kai didn’t like it any more than Poloma did. How much more strain could the mountain take?
